Until the 23rd June referendum, the political scene will be increasingly dominated by the wrangling between the "in" and "out" camps and Tory in-fighting. And we can expect this to be the case during this May's elections as well.

Yet what can be more irrelevant today for us than these rivalries and the arguments used to justify them? Aren't both camps claiming to defend "Britain's national interest" - when we know all too well that for them, this "national interest" only involves the interests of the bosses?

Why should we support the "out" camp, when it's merely trying to turn the clock back, under the pretext of reclaiming full "sovereignty" for the British parliament? When this is the very same parliament which has been responsible for dozens of anti-working class measures over the past years!

And why should we support Cameron's "in" camp? Wouldn't this be endorsing, not just his new attacks against EU workers, but also his attacks, past and present, against all workers?

So, no, there is no stake for the working class in all this politicking over the EU.

Beware: it's a diversion!

But what makes the whole EU charade completely mad, is that it is taking place at a time when the world is once again threatened by a new financial crash. In fact, Osborne has already been using this threat to justify more austerity measures for this month's budget.

This, however, doesn't stop politicians from playing politics with the issue of the EU and even, in the case of the "out" camp, from claiming that the British economy has a future by "going it alone", against the rest of the world!

That a new economic crisis will break out - and probably one which will be significantly worse than the last one - is no longer a question of "if", but merely a question of "when". And in this event, Osborne (or whichever politician is in his job) will be quick to turn the screw of austerity tighter than ever before, to make the working class pay, so as to preserve the profits of the bosses.

Against this backdrop, the EU is just a convenient diversion for the bosses' politicians. It allows them to blame our worsening living and working conditions on the EU's alleged "constraints" (in the case of Cameron) or on EU membership (in the case of the "out" camp). And it allows all of them to blame EU workers for the lousy jobs and low wages that more and more of us have to put up with.

This is why the working class should not fall for their divisive con. Instead, we need to prepare for the new attacks they have in store for us so that we are ready to take them on.

This decaying system has no future

What makes the charade over the EU so absurd, is that it is all based on the idea that swathes of land, called "countries", should be run as separate entities and surrounded by artificial lines, called "borders", which can only be crossed by showing some sort of identification.

But do these national borders still make any sense today? When most of the objects we use - from cars to TVs and mobile phones - are manufactured by assembling parts coming from all over the world? And when the internet makes it possible to establish links between people from every part of the planet? Surely not?

But what these borders do, is to create artificial obstacles which prevent the pooling together of all available resources - both human and economic - on a world scale. For a rational organisation of the planet's economy, it's not just a European Union that would be needed, but a real World Union, freed of all these obstacles, where all resources would be made available according to need and all men and women would be able to travel and settle wherever they want. After all, why should anyone have to live in the frozen or sweltering regions of the planet when there is plenty of space in its more temperate regions?

National borders have only survived to date, in order to serve this crisis-ridden, decaying capitalist system. Each national state is there to serve the interests of its capitalists. The large multinationals use the state of their home countries to boost their profits, whether in the form of procurements, tax handouts, subsidies, tariffs against their competitors, etc., when they do not use its military might to bomb their way into the poor countries. Wasn't the Iraq war about the US and British oil companies getting full access to the country's oil resources?

The capitalist system has long been in a state of terminal decay. And the longer this decay goes on, the uglier its symptoms will be - until it is finally overthrown, once and for all.